Hi guys, I'm your only voice at work, and not a good one, I'm always taking punches for using a different IDE, everyone uses IDEA or ecplise and I use netbeans since 4.6 probably.

But since I never used another IDE I don't know what to reply.

If there are any converted among you please tell me some comparisons that would be nice to say.

In what way is Netbeans better that IDEA?

eclipse is such a hastle with plugin failing without any trace of error than I don't have too much trouble with it.

thanks,

f.

My personal preference is it's (in my opinion) better integration with Maven. It doesn't try to import maven, it uses maven. Not only in building, but also as the the pom.xml file as the definition of where things are. When you open Maven project, it all just works without importing, etc. I really love how NetBeans can locate the source for artifacts, either when the source jars are available or if it knows how to find the source project from your history. And, it just does it.

What I've found in IntelliJ is you have to import the POM into its own internal structure. Then you have to know what facets to apply to which parts of the IDE where. I'm a very simple person. There are people who use IntelliJ here at work as well. And the number of times things behaved different in their IDEA as opposed to the maven build (which is what our automated processes use) is quite frequent. Because things didn't get imported, or they didn't get imported correctly, or because what is executed within IntelliJ is just different enough from the Maven project.

I'm a simple person. :) NetBeans provides me all the functionality I need, and I don't need to renew a license every year. Again, personal preference, but trying IntelliJ after using NetBeans for a long time, I found it way too busy, too much information on the screen. And I can never figure out how to drive Eclipse. I'm happy to chalk this up to personal preference, and not something to qualify.

It was also really nice to be the only person here who could connect their profiler to a troublesome process inside of two minutes.

In the end, we all have our crutch of choice. Maybe I've always just understood NetBeans, and I'm so used to how it operates that using another IDE now requires a learning curve. There are nice things about any IDE. I actually really like the Scala IDE, which is based on Eclipse. This is one of those arguments you're never going to win. If you're allowed to use whatever tool you want, use what works best for you. It's all about what you are most productive with.